maxiuca

Parallels Workstation Extreme is so far the only desktop virtualization software that allows video card passthrough (with Windows as host) to a virtual machine using Intel's VT-d. My goal is to run osx in a VM that has direct access to a GPU and therefore full QE/CI acceleration.

Since I haven't found any information about a similar project anywhere on the web I decided to start a topic here, hoping to get some attention and help from more experienced osx86 fans

My hardware is: Asus Rampage IV Extreme, 32 GB of RAM, i7 3930K stepping C2, OC'ed to 4.7 GHz, GTX 680 as main card, Quadro FX 1800 for passthrough.

The tricky thing about Parallels is that you need a Quadro card (and only several are tested and "guaranteed" to work) to passthrough. For some reason regular GTX cards don't work (I've tried several: GTX 470, GTX 570, GTX 680, GT 120 and GT 240). I've chose FX 1800 cause it was the cheapest of the supported ones but also and mainly because a Linux program that I'm using requires this particular graphics adapter...

Here is what I was able to achieve so far:

1. Working and so far quite stable installation of SL 10.6.8 with sound, network and shared folders

2. Passthrough seems to be working, the card is recognized by the system, the nvidia kext is being always loaded (no matter if I use Graphics Enabler, Injectors or gfx strings), but I always get a  black screen when the graphics driver kicks in (although the monitor wakes up for a moment as if some kind of initialization was happening)

So the system starts fine, I can log into it via TeamViewer, but when I check the graphic card in system profiler the "Display" entries are empty as if no monitor was connected.
I've tried Graphics Enabler, several injectors, GFX strings in Chameleon as well as DSDT (although I probably did something wrong, cause DSDT method gave the same results as plain startup)

I'm out of ideas. My last guess is that I may have a wrong NVCAP, cause FX 1800 had one DVI and two DP ports and NVCAP Maker generates a string that closely resembles strings of regular (2xDVI or DVI and VGA) GTX cards.